Kim Brandstrup

Kim Brandstrup is to perform at The Royal Ballet in London a new ballet in the spring using a “lost” Prokofiev score. The music was written in 1936 for a film of “The Queen of Spades” to be made by Mikhail Romm. Political interference in the arts during the Stalinist era prevented that. Prokofiev’s later scores for “Alexander Nevsky” and “Ivan the Terrible” contributed to the classic status these Sergei Eisenstein movies now enjoy. Some would contend that Prokofiev wrote with more natural facility for the movies than for the ballet stage.

The Danish choreographer Kim Brandstrup was reading an article by an American biographer about Prokofiev and, as reported in The Times of London “saw in the footnotes that he had part written this film score and that it was in a Moscow archive. Then I found that a photocopy was at the department of Music at Goldsmiths, University of London.” After looking at the fragmented and unfinished score, Brandstrup approached Monica Mason, Director of the Royal Ballet and suggested a ballet based on the music. She suggested the composer Michael Berkeley, with his long association with the Royal Opera House, as a suitable person to arrange the score. The ...